The Anatomy of a Top-Rated Autodesk University Presentation

Autodesk University 2019 begins on November 19th, 2019 in
Las Vegas, NV. With class selections made, presenters are feverishly working on
their presentations. While every presenter strives to deliver a world-class
presentation, not all do.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking at Autodesk University for more than a decade. While I’d love to tell you every one of those presentations was a world-class session, the truth is not all were. Some ideas proved great on paper but not so great in execution.

To put my experiences (good and bad) to good use, I’ve
worked on dissecting some of my past presentations. In this process, I wanted
to see what if any common threads existed between my great and not-so-great AU
sessions.

While every session was unique in its own way, I was able to
find some common threads among my most successful presentations. With the hope
others may be able to benefit from it, I’ve compiled my findings in this post.
While the successes of every presenter are unique, these are the threads I’ve
found most relevant to the presentations I develop.

Although I am focusing
on Autodesk University, I should say the methods I’ve tried to capture in this
post can apply to just about any technical presentation you might deliver.

Be Authentic. Be You.

What differentiates your presentation isn’t the information
you share, but instead you as an individual. That doesn’t mean the information
is insignificant, but instead to recognize Google has made information by
itself a commodity. Delivering a top-rated session requires you to offer your
audience more than knowledge alone. It demands authenticity on the part of you,
the presenter.

Authenticity is a presentation-quality with many facets.
Paramount among them is to know your presentation. Although your subject matter
expertise is part of knowing your presentation, it’s not everything. Knowing
your presentation also means you’re well-rehearsed. It means you know the basic
flow and structure of your presentation. We’ll talk about this more in a
moment, but it means speaking to a central objective throughout your entire
presentation.

Another facet to authenticity is your presentation style.
How do you interact and connect with your audience? What’s the tempo of your
presentation? How do you leverage humor in your presentation?

Even if this is your first time delivering a presentation,
you’ve at least attended presentations in the past. Perhaps you’ve watched past
class recordings on Autodesk University online. Whatever your source, studying
past presentations is a great way to find your answer to the question of what
your presentation style will be.

Some successful presenters tell jokes, whereas others don’t.
Some presenters have a high-tempo delivery style, other’s dial it back a notch
or two, or five. Some presenters work the room, others remain planted at the
podium.

In completing this exercise, there’s almost no wrong answer.
Evaluating other presenters is a great way to identify ideas that can refine
and further develop your own presentation style. That last part is critical.
Your own presentation style.

Studying other presenters is a great way to improve your own
presentation skills, but its no substitute to you being you. Borrow ideas from
other presenters, but don’t try to be them. Present your material in a way
that’s true to you and the person you are.

People who forget this are the people audiences see-through.
So above all, be you and provide an authentic experience to your audience.

Tell a Story

We’ve all attended those presentations where a speaker
talked for an hour or more about a topic, but we have no idea what they
actually said during that hour. This is most often due to a lack of structure.
While your presentation objectives are a great place to start, they shouldn’t serve
as the only structure of your presentation.

Analyzing some of the most memorable presentations I’ve
attended, I’ve found that nearly everyone shares a common trait. The
presentation tells a story.

Applying storytelling principles to your presentation
achieves many things. First and foremost, it provides a structure your audience
is already familiar with, even if subconsciously. Part of that structure is
providing a clear beginning middle and end of the presentation to your
audience.

It doesn’t matter what type of presentation you were
selected to deliver, somewhere in your material is a story. Presentations are
most often cast from our past experiences. Those past experiences are where
you’ll find the voice of your story.

Leveraging past experiences brings a necessary purpose and
structure to your presentation. Something else it does is anchor your
presentation. Anchoring your presentation achieves two important things. First,
it tells your audience what you’re going to talk about,. Secondly, it lets you
tell your audience what you’re not going to talk about.

Defining both what you’re going to talk about and what
you’re not going to talk about is crucial as it establishes a social contract
with your audience. Communicating what you aren’t planning to talk about helps
focus your audience. It brings the audience into your narrative. This helps
keep audience interactions focused, and on topic.

Ever been to a presentation where every question seemed to
come out of right field? There’s a good chance that presenter failed to anchor
their presentation.

The Three-Act Narrative

There are many ways to tell a story, but the most popular is
undoubtedly the three-act narrative. Study literature or cinema, and you will
encounter the three-act narrative.

Because of the ubiquity of the three-act narrative, it’s not
only a simple structure but also an effective one. Because it’s so ubiquitous,
the structure needs no instruction manual for your audience to follow along
with.

As implied by its name, the three-act narrative has three
parts. These three parts include setup, confrontation, and resolution.

In literature, the setup usually introduces the characters
and their environment; the confrontation how all of what they know is
challenged in some way; and the resolution is where everyone (hopefully) lives
happily ever after.

Although great for literature, that structure doesn’t seem
so obviously applied to technically focused presentations. Recognizing this,
I’ve coined a slight adaptation to the classic three-act narrative for
technical presentations.

The adapted structure I apply to technical presentations is
Problem, Benefit, and Solution. The structure not so accidentally creates a
memorable acronym of PBS.

State the Problem Your Presentation will Solve

No matter how well-intentioned, audiences have short
attention spans. That’s not a criticism of audiences, but rather a recognition
that their time is valuable. With this in mind, you should strive to define the
purpose of your presentation within the first several minutes of your
presentation.

While the learning objectives defined for your presentation
are a helpful way to accomplish this, its often something audiences forget by
the end of your presentation.

Instead, you should focus on summarizing your presentation
into a singular purpose. A unique problem your presentation will help solve.
The more concise, the better.

Although a couple words are best, your purpose should be no
more than a sentence. It should also be a phrase you circle back to throughout
your presentation. Think of it like a little bell that tells your audience to
listen up.

State why the problem is worth solving

So you’ve defined the problem your presentation solves, it’s
time to jump into the meat of your presentation – right? Wrong.

As technically minded individuals, it’s hard to admit that
not every problem is worth solving. Sure, in a perfect world, we would have the
time and bandwidth to solve every issue we encounter, but this is the real
world. Sometimes the cost of fixing a problem is higher than the reality of
just dealing with it.

A presentation that cannot prove its worth is often a
presentation an audience quickly forgets. To fully captivate your audience, you
must show the problem your presentation solves has a cost higher than the value
of the solution you’re proposing.

You might achieve this through data points like people
forget 50% of what they learn after just an hour. It’s also possible to make
this through emotional statements.

A presentation about better-supporting users may have a
catchphrase of “just a minute” to illustrate the many minutes, and by
extension hours of productivity lost through inefficiencies.

When using this type of emotional quantifier, I’ll typically
use a question to prompt the audience to establish their own answer. A question
like, how many minutes do your users wait for information during a typical
workday?

Whatever method you use, defining a problem, and benefit to
the audience is essential for success.

Communicate how to solve the problem

Many presenters begin their presentation by reviewing the
learning objectives and jumping straight into the solution to those objectives.
While some presenters find success in this structure, many do not. It’s for
that reason I encourage you not to take shortcuts to this step.

Although discussing your learning objectives are most
important to your session, spending time to anchor your presentation is equally
vital for success.

Building upon those concepts, I will often apply the Problem
Benefit Solution structure to each of my learning objectives. This has the
effect of placing another three-act narrative in the middle of the broader,
all-encompassing, narrative established at the start of the presentation.

The key benefit I find in this method is my audience is
never left to wonder what problem I am trying to solve for them. This not only
helps anchor the presentation even more, but it also makes the class more
natural for the audience to follow along with.

Challenge your audience with something to do.

Technical presentations are famous for abrupt endings. I’m
paraphrasing, but the presentation often ends as “that’s how you do XYZ in
the software, does anyone have any questions?”

The first person to ask a question at the end of your
presentation should be you. Leveraging the earlier example of using the
catchphrase of “just a minute,” I might end the presentation with the
question “how can you save minutes hours with XYZ software?”

Choosing a possessive term like “you” is
intentional in this scenario as I’m trying to convey ownership of the concepts
I’ve presented to my audience. Basically stating these ideas started out as
mine, but now they’re yours, how will you put them to use?

Break the Rules. Be You.

Back to my first point about authenticity. Above all, you
should be you. Achieving that is rarely achieved by following someone else’s
script. With this in mind, this post outlines some of the strategies I’ve
employed to deliver highly-rated sessions at Autodesk University. The methods
I’ve found success in may not be the methods you find success in.

For this reason, I encourage you to look at this post as a
framework for success, not a blueprint for success. Above all, make your
session your own, and deliver some sort of lasting value for your audience.

Speaking of lasting value, let’s build upon the principles
I’ve outlined in this post. Are you someone who presents to technically-focused
audiences? If so, let me know in the comments what presentation methods have
you found success in.

Likewise, are you someone who has endured a lackluster
presentation? Let us know what methods you wish the presenter would have
employed in the comments below.